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Television

The majority of the Ehara siblings’ young lives has been captured on film by their father Kaz Ehara. The result is a new documentary — Sweet Dreams for Chiyo — set to air on CBC Sunday night. (Parabola Films)

That wasn’t an option for Hamilton couple Kaz and Rhiana Ehara after their daughter Chiyo was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of two, just three months after their son Cai was born. But as filmmakers, it seemed natural to shoot footage they could pause and rewind later. They saw it as a way to get some perspective on the emotional havoc that had erupted in their lives.

The camera rolled for the next six years, ultimately resulting in the one-hour documentary Sweet Dreams for Chiyo, airing on CBC Docs POV on Sunday.

“We didn’t intend to make a film,” Rhiana says. “We were struggling and we couldn’t get any objectivity about what was going on in our family so we sort of decided … ‘You and I will look at it later and maybe it will help us figure out what’s happening in this chapter of our life.’

“Things were going so fast and we were so focused on keeping Chiyo alive, I was worried that we were missing all of Cai’s babyhood.”

As it turns out, the ever-present camera is both a blessing and a curse. Controlling Chiyo’s blood-sugar levels requires constant vigilance, and cinematographer Kaz captures a million moments and “interviews” with Rhiana on film. We see her at a birthday party, commenting that she’s the only parent to stay, “furtively counting carbs like a weirdo.” Here she is feeding Chiyo yogurt in the middle of the night. And here she’s having a meltdown after the kids were fighting all day, Cai was running with scissors and she has a headache from her own screaming. She says, “I’m trying to tell you I’m getting close to falling apart,” and later, exhausted, “Please stop filming me.”

In one wrenching scene, Chiyo is sobbing and pleading with Rhiana not to change the insulin pump that’s attached by a needle to her stomach.

The procedure is traumatic for everyone present. The family dog, a pug nicknamed Ruby, is clearly distressed while it’s happening and afterward, Cai gives Chiyo a tender, comforting hug.

Only Kaz is absent from the scene. And when he watches the footage that night, he comes to a painful realization: He’s been hiding behind the camera, using it to avoid facing his fears head-on. Including the fear that he’s not the father he hopes to be, that he’ll make a mistake, or that something will happen to Chiyo in the night and he’ll be the one to discover it.

“That was my coping mechanism,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, why am I not helping her? Or why I’m not responding the way I should be?’” he says. “I wasn’t a good active participant in parenting.”

It was an agonizing turning point.

Eventually, when Rhiana says she doesn’t want him to film anymore, Kaz asks, “You know how to focus, right?”

Even Chiyo, who has called the camera “his other baby,” takes a turn behind the lens.

In the documentary, Kaz muses that it’s easy to forget how he and Rhiana started out. It was a whirlwind. They met on her 21st birthday. Kaz took a portrait photo of her and gave it to her as a gift. Two months later, they were married. Five years after that, Chiyo was on the way. When she suddenly became fatigued and excessively thirsty as a toddler, it was the start of another whirlwind.

From the start, Rhiana says she felt more confident caring for Chiyo, and she would have been doing the lion’s share even if Kaz hadn’t been filming.

“It’s difficult for the parent who has less experience and less confidence to gain the confidence and experience, and in my case I was definitely holding on to the control,” she says.

“Now, thankfully, we’ve reached the point where everything I can do with the diabetes, with taking care of Chiyo, Kaz can do as well. It’s been a long process for us to get to that point.”

Like Kaz, Rhiana found it painful at times to watch much of the footage as she was editing the film.

“Having to see things that I haven’t really had time to process, including the death of our dog, who’s really quite prominent in the film and was a very big support to me.

“It was a lot, to see our children growing up and then hearing Kaz coming to these realizations that are beautiful but also are sad, that he feels he should have been there more and he could have done better and that he should have supported me more when I was struggling — and seeing myself struggling.”

But in the end, they accomplished what they originally intended when they turned on the camera.

“I think it’s given us some perspective we wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise, about why we acted that way or what was going on in our family in that moment,” she says.

“I think we’ve come out the other side much stronger as a family, and closer.”